Thursday, June 21, 2012

The US Census Bureau recently
released a report reveals that, since the beginning of the
financial crisis, a growing number of Americans are living with
roomates or relatives. The greater part of this increase has come
from adult children living with their parents. Millennials,
this is about you.

The fact that so many Millennial adults
are living with their parents partially hides the fact that our
generation has been plunged into a level of unemployment and poverty
with no parallel since the Great Depression. If poverty status were
determined by personal income, 45.3 percent of adults between the
ages of 18 and 34 would qualify as living in poverty.
Clearly, we are living in a different economic age than the one that
many of us were raised to expect.

So many of my generation know from
experience how terrible it feels to be scraping by on an absurdly low
income, unable to afford both student loan payments and groceries.
What is even more demoralizing is that many of us have virtually no
income, and millions are forced to rely on parents and relatives to
provide even the most basic needs while we work unpaid internships or
desperately search for work. No matter how you slice it, being broke
is awful.

But lack of money is not the worst
of it. The truth is, most people my age are coming to terms with
our economic diminishment. We know that we will probably never be as
materially prosperous as our parents were, but we know that this is
not necessarily a tragedy. We are acutely aware of the environmental,
social and health impacts of the consumerist binge of the late 20th
century, and many of us do not feel deprived to not be able to
participate. On the contrary, thrift is increasingly becoming a
virtue, and care for the earth is a very real consideration in our
spending choices. We are willing to pay more, and to live less
luxuriously, if it means that we can inhabit a healthier, more
sustainable world.

So, if many of us are content living
with less, what is the problem? One word: Jobs. I am confident that
my generation can thrive in a world where unrestrained luxury gives
way to global responsibility and sustainability. That is the world
that we want to live in. But being chronically jobless or
underemployed is not sustainable. The prolonged drought of
meaningful employment is tearing my generation down in slow motion.
It is crippling us professionally, emotionally and spiritually. And
we will bear the scars for decades to come.

In his new book, End
This Depression Now!, economistPaul
Krugman observes that, "People who want to work but can't
find work suffer greatly, not just from the loss of income but from a
diminished sense of self-worth." The youngest cohort of
adults today are not simply facing a loss of income, we are facing a
loss of meaning. Who are we? What is our purpose? What value do
we offer a society that tells us repeatedly and simultaneously: "We
don't need you," and "Why don't you grow up?"

There do not seem to be any easy
answers to the challenges that we are facing on the level of
economics and public policy. It may be many years before the job
market returns to what was once considered "normal." In the
meantime, however, we Millennials are going to have to make sense of
our lives, often in the absence of meaningful employment. What might
this look like? How can we shed the shame and feelings of personal
failure that come with un(der)employment and begin to look for ways
to empower ourselves, regardless of the economic outlook?

If anything is clear by now, it is that
older generations are not going to provide us with systems of
meaning. It might be tempting to go into a holding pattern, to cross
our fingers and hope that our economy and sense of core values will
eventually recover. But I do not think that is good strategy.
Instead, how might we focus our energies to create the just, healthy,
sustainable and meaningful society that we long for? The answer to
this question will undoubtably involve a lot of tough, entreprenurial
work - work that will go largely unsupported by the dying systems and
institutions that are clawing for survival right now. Birthing a new
society in the crumbling ruins of the old will not be easy.

But I believe we can do it. Time and
again, older generations have asked us, "when will you grow up?"
Now is the time to demonstrate that we are
grown - but that our adulthood does not conform to 20th century
assumptions. We can model a responsible, sustainable adulthood that
produces the fruits of justice: A society in which the poor are not
crushed, the earth is not ravished, and there is meaningful work for
everyone who is willing to contribute. The time has come to shake off
the shame that we have lived under for so long and to embrace the
power that is latent in our generation, if only we will choose to
exercise it.

2 comments:

Young people should lose any feelings of shame or of personal inadequacy or failure immediately. Not all old people believed in the 20th century assumptions and as I am sure you are aware it would be the greatest folly to ignore the wisdom that age brings to people.

This is fast becoming one of my top 5 blogs ... Thank-you and keep up the good work.

This reality is one that is making it harder and harder for me to stay within a traditional educational institution. what are taught to young people as 'viable' skills? what is taught as 'meaningful' work? a sense of value in trades, a sense of value in local resilience is lost by and large, with this ever expanding sense of the global. this is not to say we should isolate ourselves in small pod-like communities, but it is to say that there are OTHER rubrics with which to evaluate success. your post points in the direction, but i am hungry for more, and think a lot about alternative economic structures, alternative living arrangements, ways of living outside of this death-dealing economy. i am 38, so fall outside of your age-range of millennial, but as someone on the tail end of 'x,' i think these questions are just as salient. i cling to a job with little security or satisfaction, but wonder if moving outside of this and making something with others, would speak more to this possibility of living beyond the shame of defining one's value by one's job.thanks for opening this dialogue, i hope to engage in this more.